Friday, November 17, 2017

I gave the problems orally, one at a time and groups made their way through them. It was great to watch them work. For groups that made mistakes, it was often enough for me to say "Are you sure?" for them to think a bit about what they did and find their mistakes.

We then moved onto today's work.

This problem was closely related to yesterday's Dandy Candies only this time the side lengths didn't need to be integer values. Most groups easily made the connection to yesterday's work and quickly came up with a solution. One of the groups was really struggling so I spent some time walking them through it.

Then we moved onto these problems:

Theses problems seemed to be at just the right level. Students seemed to be in flow for the entire period. When groups would get stuck I'd ask a question or provided a hint and off they'd go.

The last problem I gave dealt with a cylinder rather than a rectangular prism.

A couple of groups didn't get this far today, but those that did made some great headway. A couple of groups struggled with what the cylindrical equivalent to a cube would be. I asked how they would approach the problem if the top and bottom were rectangles rather than squares. That was enough to get them going. One of the groups, on their own, actually drew a cylinder inside a cube. It was a thing of beauty. I wish I'd taken a picture of it.

We were out of time so I gave a couple of rectangular prism questions to practice for homework. We'll pick up with the cylinders again on Monday and consolidate all of the optimization.

The period flew by today. Students were right into the work. It was challenging but not so much so that they couldn't overcome the challenges. What a great period.